Apex Legends had 50 million players in its first month, faster than Fortnite

It took Fortnite more than four months.

Apex Legends only launched a month ago and has already been played by 50 million people, according to Respawn's Vince Zampella. It's strange to think that only a handful of weeks ago most of us had never even heard of it, and it definitely feels like it's been around for a lot longer.

In that time, players have used 158 million finishers (I wonder if it includes all the ones I tried to do before being killed mid-finisher), 1.23 billion ultimates, placed 31 billion pings and respawned 170 million times.

Thank you to the 50 million players that have shown up in the first month since Apex Legends launched! You have all made this something special and there's much more to come! pic.twitter.com/EoDcjF5q9EMarch 4, 2019

The astronomical numbers aren't entirely surprising, though. From the moment it launched, it started drawing in a crowd. In its first day it had 2.5 million players. That grew to 10 million players after 72 hours. And by the end of its first week, more than 25 million people had duked it out on the island.

Analyst Daniel Ahmad made some comparisons between Fortnite's initial player numbers, specifically the battle royale, on Twitter. It took Fortnite a fortnight to hit 10 million players, and even after 16 weeks, it didn't boast 50 million players. It's the closest comparison and the numbers are interesting, though it's worth remembering the very different battle royale landscapes the games dropped into.

Battle royales were still very new when Fortnite's battle royale mode appeared, and it was based on a game that people had been pretty lukewarm on. Save the World was a confused mashup of games that had already started to feel dated. Fortnite also didn't launch in a finished state, while Apex Legends is a complete, polished game. That's also why it scored 93 in our Apex Legends review.

While Apex Legends is rapidly catching up to Epic's behemoth, it's still got 150 million players to go.